Sending regular support to family abroad when the amount is not small

You send £3,000 a month home. Sometimes more. It has been that shape for years now. Your mother’s rent, your father’s carer, your brother’s school fees, the extension on the family flat. It is not a decision each month. It is a standing thing, the way your salary is a standing thing, and it will be the same figure next month.

The fee lands on the receipt every time, and it looks small. It looks like the price of the tool. At your size the fee is only a part of what you are paying, and the app everyone told you to use is built for someone sending far less than you.

The reader this piece is for

You are not the £300-a-month reader every other article about “regular payments abroad” is written for. She uses an app, and for her the app is the right tool. You are on the other side of a line the apps do not draw on their own comparison pages. You send £2,000 to £5,000 a month, sometimes more, always to the same person, always into the same account. The support is not a project with a deadline. It is the arithmetic of eldest-daughter or eldest-son life, and it will be the same next year and the year after.

Your problem is not “which app is cheapest”. Your problem is that the app is a remittance-shaped tool with a remittance-shaped price, and what you are sending is not a remittance. It is a monthly commitment the size of a small salary, and it deserves a tool built for its shape.

This piece is that tool, plainly, with the numbers to check the arithmetic and the setup to do it. If you are the £300 reader, the piece for you is here and this one is not.

What the app is quietly costing you

Start with what you can check. Open Wise now, put in £3,000, pick the country you send to. The fee comes back on the screen, and the rate is close to what you see on Google. Wise does not add a markup to the rate; the fee is the only cost. That is the whole point of the app, and it is real.

Here is what the fee looks like on a £3,000 send from the UK, on a bank-funded transfer, as of 31 August 2026:

• India: £14.30 per send. £171.60 a year.
• Philippines: £16.34 per send. £196.08 a year.
• Nigeria: £17.02 per send. £204.24 a year.
• Pakistan: £18.33 per send. £219.96 a year.
• Kenya: £30.68 per send. £368.16 a year.

Kenya is the one that stands out. On Wise, sending pounds to Kenya costs about twice as much per send as sending to India, the Philippines or Nigeria. You are not doing anything wrong; that route is expensive for reasons that live inside how Wise moves money into Kenyan banks, not inside how much you are sending.

Over five years of monthly sends, those annual numbers double you. The Philippines reader has spent about £980 on Wise fees over five years of sending £3,000 a month. The Kenya reader has spent about £1,840. Neither is catastrophic. Neither is invisible. Both are more than the tool markets itself as costing.

The receipt shows one send. Over a year of monthly sends to the same person, the fee adds up to the annual figures above, and next year it will add up to the same again.

What Revolut is doing under the hood

If your tool is Revolut instead, the arithmetic is different and, on the free plan, quietly worse.

Revolut Standard, the free tier most people are on, gives you £1,000 of currency exchange a month before it starts charging you. That £1,000 is cumulative: any pounds you change into any other currency, including any crypto or commodity trade, counts against it. One £3,000 transfer to family abroad uses your whole allowance in a single tap, and the other £2,000 inside that transfer is billed at Revolut’s fair-usage rate of one percent.

That is £20 on that one transfer. Over a year of monthly £3,000 sends, £240 in fair-usage fees, before Revolut’s own transfer fee on top. Their standard international transfer fee runs from about £5 per send and varies by destination. Call it another £60 a year. Around £300 a year, on the tool that markets itself as free.

There is a version of Revolut where this works. The Metal plan costs £14.99 a month, which is £180 a year, and it gives you £40,000 a month of free currency exchange, more than enough for a £3,000 sender. It also takes forty percent off the standard transfer fee. If you are going to use Revolut for this shape of send, you should be on Metal. Nobody tells you that at signup, and the free-tier reader who does not know to look ends up paying more per year than the Metal reader who does.

One thing to know about Revolut on any plan: any exchange you do at the weekend, between about 10pm UK time on Friday and 11pm on Sunday, carries an extra one percent fee. If your standing order lands on a Saturday morning, you are paying that markup every month without seeing it. Move the day to a Tuesday and the markup goes away.

What WorldRemit is doing under the hood

WorldRemit uses a different pricing shape, and it is the one most likely to catch out the recurring sender.

WorldRemit charges a small fixed fee, often between £0 and £5, and takes the rest of its money in a markup on the exchange rate. The markup varies by country, from around half a percent on the cheaper routes to about four percent on the more expensive ones. On a £3,000 send at a middle-of-the-road markup of one and a half percent, that is £45 a month you cannot see on the transfer confirmation, because it is inside the rate. Over a year, about £540.

The promotional rates you see in WorldRemit’s ads are aimed at first-time customers, capped and one-shot. If you have been sending for years, none of it applies to you. The reader they are advertising to is not you; the price you are paying is the standard rate, and the standard rate is not cheap.

Send £3,000 a month to the Philippines on WorldRemit and, on the typical markup for that route, you are paying around £45 a month in a gap nobody labels on the screen. The receipt shows a small fixed fee and calls the rate “the exchange rate you get”. The rate you get is not the rate you see on Google. It is the rate you see on Google, minus WorldRemit’s cut. That is the transfer’s real cost.

The tool built for your size

There is a product for the reader sending £2,000 to £5,000 a month, and it is not on the price-comparison pages, because the price-comparison pages are built around remittance apps. It is called a regular payment plan, and it lives inside the specialist currency brokers the property-buyers and the pension-transferrers use. The mechanics are quiet and there is nothing to admire about them, which is exactly what you want for a monthly commitment that has to keep running.

You open an account with the broker. Someone from their dealing desk calls you within a working day to introduce themselves. On that call, you agree the rate you want to lock in. That rate is fixed for the period you agree, up to twelve months. You set up a direct debit for the monthly amount. The broker takes the money on the same day each month, converts it at the rate you agreed months ago, and pays it into your family’s account. There is no per-transfer fee. There is nothing to open, nothing to tap. The rate does not move for the term of the plan.

That last part is what actually beats the app, and it is not the fee. The app charges you a small fee and gives you a rate close to the one you see on Google that day. The broker charges you no fee and gives you a rate the broker fixed months ago. On the months the pound rises, the app wins. On the months the pound falls, the broker wins. Over a year, on the mainstream routes to India, the Philippines or Nigeria, they land in about the same place on the arithmetic alone.

Where the broker wins outright is on everything the arithmetic does not measure.

Your family does not care what the exchange rate did this month. They care that the same figure arrives on the same day. When the pound falls five percent in a month, the reader on the app watches the amount arriving fall by five percent too, and finds out about it from a message from home. The reader on the broker’s fixed rate does not.

You do not log into anything each month. Over five years of monthly sends, that is around sixty logins you did not do, and the small anxieties that come with each of them.

There is no allowance to run out of. Nothing like Revolut’s £1,000 cap. Nothing like WorldRemit’s promo mechanic. The plan is the plan, for as long as it runs.

There is no app-goes-quiet risk. Wise has closed to new Indian customers more than once in the last two years. A tool that could stop taking your money one Tuesday is not the tool for a standing obligation to someone you love.

And when something breaks, there is a phone number and someone at the broker who already knows your account, your beneficiary and your history.

The broker Boki uses

For a personal move at the size of a life saving, or for a standing monthly commitment in the shape this piece describes, an FCA-authorised currency broker is usually the right tool. It is what Boki uses for a transfer this size, and the reasons are the same reasons a broker beats an app for a recurring sender: the broker holds an FCA authorisation to hold your money in a segregated client account, quotes you a rate on the phone that is closer to the real exchange rate than any UK high-street bank will give you, and can fix that rate for a year of monthly payments rather than moving with the market each week.

Boki uses <a href="/go/currencies-direct/" rel="sponsored nofollow">Currencies Direct</a> for this shape of transaction. It has been running personal-lump and regular-payment transfers into and out of the UK for around thirty years (Companies House 03041197, incorporated 1995), it is FCA-authorised as an Electronic Money Institution (firm reference number 900669), and its regular payment plan is the product this piece is pointing at. There is no per-transfer fee. The rate is fixed for the period you agree, up to twelve months. The direct debit runs itself.

One thing worth knowing before you sign up: a broker will call you. When you open the account online, someone from their dealing desk will phone within a working day to introduce themselves and walk you through the first transfer. That is how brokers work. If you do not want the call, an app is the wrong shape of tool for you. The other thing is that the rate you are quoted on the phone is the rate that binds; the online rate is an indication. Ask for the executable quote in writing (a screenshot or a confirmation email is fine) before you agree to send.

On a £300 test transfer, this shape of tool would give you a slightly worse rate than Wise and take a working day longer. On a £3,000 monthly commitment run for a year, it removes the fee, removes the rate risk, removes the monthly login, and gives you a phone number for the day something breaks. That is what you are being sold, and at this size it is what you are being sold on.

The setup, in order

If you are going to do this, here is the order it goes in.

1. Open an account online with the broker. It takes a few minutes and asks for the usual identification the FCA rules require.
2. Take the phone call. It is one call, not a sales sequence. The person on the other end is a dealer, not a rep; the question they will ask is what you want to do, and the answer is “a regular payment plan of £X a month to this account in this country”.
3. Agree the rate on the phone. That is the rate that binds. Ask for the confirmation in writing before you agree to send.
4. Set up the direct debit for the amount and the date. Keep the confirmation. That is the whole setup.
5. On the first month, watch that the payment arrives on the day the plan says it will. It will take up to eight working days from the direct debit to clear and land, so time the first transfer with that in mind. After the first one, it runs.

Nothing exotic. No portfolio, no products, no upsell. A dull, working tool for a monthly commitment of the size you are making.

If you are the smaller sender

If you are sending under £1,000 a month, this piece is not for you and the arithmetic does not work the same way. At that size, Wise or Revolut on the right plan is the right tool. The piece on setting up a monthly transfer on those tools is here. Read that one instead. The tool for the £300 sender is not the tool for the £3,000 sender, and each is right for its own reader.

If you are somewhere between (£1,000 to £2,000 a month, sending to a country Wise supports well), the plain answer is that the tools land close enough on the arithmetic that convenience is the tiebreaker. If the monthly login does not bother you, the app is fine. If you would rather set the plan once and forget about it, the broker’s regular payment plan is fine. Both are correct at that size.

This piece sits under the between systems hub, alongside the guide for the reader who has moved and needs to consolidate savings and the mirror piece for the reader sending to the UK from India, Kenya or Nigeria. Different reader, different problem, different tool. Find the one that is yours.